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I was reading through some posts from 2014 related to the problem of Kexi dropping data from a table when any changes are made to the table--for example, appending a field. One of the forum posts indicated that this bug had been fixed in a later version. However, I am running the latest version, and it's still a problem. I had to resort to exporting all the data, making the change to the table, then reimporting. Quite a pain!

The technical background reason why the topic it's really a wish and not a bug: recreating a table (using CREATE TABLE) removes all the data.[1] This is the case for any database server and SQLite (backend). Issuing an ALTER TABLE SQL command instead to avoid losing the data requires knowledge of exact changes requested by the user, but she/he does not specify the query but is using the visual table designer. This makes the thing harder.

Why this works in MS Access and similar solutions? Because these database backends have dedicated support for the feature, be it Microsoft Jet or HyperSQL. This support needs to be added as a layer to Kexi, actually to Kexi's database handling framework KDb.

A simpler option would be if we agree to apply changes after each meaningful user's action in Kexi table designer such as removing/adding a column, changing data type, of course without option to undo changes.

[1] By "loosing the data" we do not mean a bug: it's currently by design; user is informed about consequence and asked for confirmation. It's more like clearing a hard drive before changing type of the filesystem.

Best regards,Jarosław Staniek

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